The Untold Journey Read online

  The UNTOLD JOURNEY

  The UNTOLD JOURNEY

  The Life of Diana Trilling

  NATALIE ROBINS

  Columbia University Press

  Publishers Since 1893

  New York Chichester, West Sussex

  cup.columbia.edu

  Copyright © 2017 Natalie Robins

  All rights reserved

  E-ISBN 978-0-231-54401-6

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Robins, Natalie S.

  Title: The untold journey : the life of Diana Trilling / Natalie Robins.

  Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016040242 (print) | LCCN 2017000065 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231182089 (cloth : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Trilling, Diana. | Authors, American—20th century—Biography.

  Classification: LCC PS3539.R55 Z85 2017 (print) | LCC PS3539.R55 (ebook) | DDC 818/.5409 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016040242

  A Columbia University Press E-book.

  CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected].

  Cover design: Julia Kushnirsky

  Cover photograph: Thomas Victor

  For my son, Noah Lehmann-Haupt

  For my daughter, Rachel Lehmann-Haupt

  For my grandson, Alexander Louis Lehmann-Haupt

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  1. ESCAPE INTO FICTION

  2. UNDERTAKINGS

  3. PROLEGOMENON

  4. ISOLATION AND DESPERATION

  5. THE REST OF OUR LIVES

  6. THE GREATEST SERVICE

  7. THE NATION CALLS

  8. NOT MERELY A CRITIC’S WIFE

  9. GLOWING

  10. OH BE BRAVE

  11. GUILT MAKES US HUMAN

  12. WEAVING

  13. SUBVERSIVE SEX

  14. A LIMITED KIND OF CELEBRITY

  15. AT A TABLE

  16. JUST CLOSE YOUR EYES

  17. NOT GIVING A DAMN

  18. HER OWN PLACE

  19. RE-CREATION AND IMAGINATION

  EPILOGUE: ARCADIA

  Acknowledgments

  Source Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  Illustrations

  PREFACE

  Upon entering the apartment at 35 Claremont Avenue, in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City, a visitor does not at first notice the group of Italian and French prints hanging above a rose-colored silk settee that had been a wedding gift, nor, sitting on a corner shelf in the living room, a gleaming gold watch, which instead of passing from father to only son had passed from father to youngest daughter. Nor does one take in the portrait of the young Henry James that stands on a banquet in the adjoining dining room. One notices instead the somberness and the fine coat of dust on an antique mahogany desk, which holds a massive lamp—and magnifying glass—and all but dominates a room that makes no concession to modern times. It is three o’clock on a warm October day in 1996. The heavy brocade drapes are already drawn, closing out any views of the avenue that in so many ways represents the essence of the Upper West Side and Columbia University.

  “She’s expecting you,” the visitor is told by a friendly, poised woman wearing a bright white nurse’s uniform. “Go right on back.”

  “Back” is the bedroom Diana Trilling shared with her husband, Lionel, for forty-six years. To get there, one walks along a well-polished wooden floor past the cheap pine-board-and-bracket bookshelves that dominate the long hallway. Volumes by Freud, Dickens, Wordsworth, Henry Adams, James Agee, and many of Lionel Trilling’s own books—his studies of Matthew Arnold and E. M. Forster; his most celebrated book, The Liberal Imagination; and his novel, The Middle of the Journey—line the shelves. Diana Trilling’s books are there, too: Claremont Essays, Mrs. Harris, The Beginning of the Journey. In fact, all ten of Lionel Trilling’s books are likely somewhere in the packed shelves, as well as Diana Trilling’s six books. Stuck here and there among the hundreds of volumes are galley proofs, magazines, pamphlets, textbooks, and occasional photographs.

  Diana Trilling is lying on a metal hospital bed set up in the middle of a room I have never been in before. I kiss her forehead, and she smiles at me. She is bedridden and knows she is dying, of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and she knows also that I was diagnosed with a less aggressive form of this cancer a year earlier. But we do not talk about illness. It is not any form of denial that keeps us from this subject (we’ve always been able to talk candidly) but rather her unspoken but very clear insistence that she go on living in the moment. And so, at her request, I read aloud several essays from the 100th Anniversary issue of The New York Times Book Review. After I finish the review of Freud’s A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, she closes her eyes. I say, “It’s probably time I leave.” She nods. Five days later I return to read more to her. She is much weaker, and I don’t expect to stay long. But she wants to hear more and more, even after briefly closing her eyes. “I should leave,” I say. “No, not yet,” she answers. I see that once again she is not resisting death but telling me she still has some points of living to explore. “Just sit here,” she says. And I hold her hand for over an hour, and feel a strength as strong as steel.

  I first met Diana Trilling in 1988, when I interviewed her about her husband’s FBI file, which I had applied for under the Freedom of Information Act for inclusion in my book Alien Ink: The FBI’s War on Freedom of Expression (1992). I had heard her referred to many times as one of the very last of the notable midcentury New York Intellectuals—one who was equally notable for being extremely difficult—and had been warned she’d probably be pretty intimidating. I somehow felt I could handle that characteristic if it showed up (which it never did), but I was certain she’d have passionate reactions to every piece of paper I put before her. And she did. Lionel Trilling was admired as one of America’s most influential and original literary critics, often fêted worldwide. Diana Trilling—herself an eminent social and literary critic, as well as the editor and/or author of six books and hundreds of book reviews and essays published in dozens of prominent magazines—too often lived in the shadow of her more celebrated husband, one whose courtly manners seamlessly matched her own sense of the importance of correct public conduct. But I knew also from many people that she was fiercely independent and called herself an “old-time feminist.”

  When I told her that her husband’s file had begun in 1937, she very quickly interrupted me. “That’s very stupid of them. Why as late as that? He was a member of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners; 1932 to 1933 was the period of his most ardent commitment—he was never a member of the Communist Party, never a member at all. He was a fellow traveler.” She told me that she would be questioned from time to time by agencies other than the FBI about people whose security clearance she guessed had come under suspicion. “They were very intelligent,” she said of these interviewers, “and they knew an enormous amount about me!”

  When I said that the next reference in her husband’s file wasn’t until 1944, seven years after the first one, she was extremely curious. “What did they have?” she asked, almost breathlessly. I told her the page was mostly blacked out except for the words “The Revolutionary Workers League.” Without a word she picked up the phone, which was on a well-worn mahogany coffee table in front of the silk settee where she was sitting. She dialed a number, and after a brief greeting she mentioned someone she called “the last living Trotskyite.” There was some muted chitchat and then she shrieked into the phone: “He’s been a professional revolution
ary all his life.” She then brusquely asked the person she was talking to, “When were you divorced? Lionel wasn’t friends with him after you were divorced. By 1944 he wasn’t on anything with him.” A few seconds later she ended the call, and after hanging up the phone, she looked pleased. She said nothing to me about the conversation, but I could tell she knew I had grasped the gist of what she was saying—that she and her husband had joined some so-called innocents clubs in the 1930s and that was that. Members of these clubs believed they were working to oppose fascism, but in reality their purpose was to undermine the West and pave the way for Communist control.

  I told her that her husband’s FBI file contained a 1947 review of his novel, The Middle of the Journey, that had appeared in the Communist Daily Worker. I said that according to the file, the FBI wanted to see if the book could give Alger Hiss and his lawyers information for his defense. (Whittaker Chambers, a former Communist, had accused Hiss of being a Soviet spy, and Lionel Trilling’s novel depicts a character based on Chambers.) “They are feeble-minded,” Diana Trilling roared. I then read her the perplexing last line of the book review: “it leaves the reader with one impression and that is that the CP is an innocent front for another sinister force.” “Well, it’s true,” Diana Trilling replied softly. Her face looked almost rapt. “It’s true.” She explained no further.

  We sat and talked for more than an hour—probably closer to two—about social upheavals from the 1920s to the 1990s and sensitive political arguments that marked each decade of her long life; every writer or editor she had ever known seemed to come into the conversation. She mentioned Allen Ginsberg, Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, William Phillips, William F. Buckley Jr., and William Jovanovich. She was surprised, even slightly offended, I sensed, that the FBI had no references in the file about her own volunteer work in 1933 with the Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners or, that same year, the Scottsboro Boys case. She wondered why the bureau wasn’t interested in these matters because “of [Lionel] being associated by marriage with me and by friendship with many people.” I explained to her that I could request the files only of dead writers, and that she would have to request her own file, and that I was sure she had one.

  She told me that she and her husband had always been anti-Communist liberals and that their position was rarely understood, especially by their literary friends. Looking pensive, she commented that William F. Buckley’s anti-Communism had nothing in common with hers. “Right-wing anti-Communism has very little in common with what I believe,” she said. She was not a neoconservative. Later, responding to a question I had asked about whether the FBI influenced the way that writers wrote their books, she resolutely said, “No.” She told me that although many people believed that the FBI had destroyed the Communist Party in America, she did not. “It was one factor of many,” she said. “The CP self-destructed.” Such judgments, especially about people and books, were, I would learn, an essential part of her nature. Although she was a feminist, she did not believe in women’s liberation, because as she wrote, it created an unnecessary complication and friction with men. In expressing all her opinions, she was sharp as a blade and didn’t seem to care if her conclusions were popular or fashionable or even brash-sounding. She followed the path of her mind to the end of its every thought, usually landing square on a spot where logic and imagination merged. She had made her share of enemies, and she was not always liked by her husband’s Columbia University colleagues. But both friends and foes recognized that she had an exquisite brilliance, and they considered her unique among women of her generation. Still, women especially sometimes judged her harshly, even those who called her a friend. There were many reasons to dislike her, they would whisper, but the real question was, why despite all did they love her?

  As we were ending our interview, I asked Diana why the government had investigated her and her husband in 1964 and 1965. She said that in 1964 they had gone to England for a year, when her husband had been a visiting professor at Oxford, and that in 1965 President Johnson had asked him to represent the United States at T. S. Eliot’s funeral. “Later they wanted him to be a cultural attaché in England or France,” she said; “they wrote to Columbia and asked if they would mind letting him go. I considered it because I wanted to go to Europe.”

  Our conversations continued and soon were part of many dinners with my husband. At one she described a party she attended in 1937, and she spoke as if it had happened the evening before. Her ailing eyes, bulging from disease and near-blindness, still managed to convey both pride and indignation. She said that for the very first time she had not retreated to a room with the other women but instead had followed the men to the library, where they were going to light up cigars and sip brandy. She lingered at the doorway, unseen, and listened to the men talk, mostly about politics. She decided that one day she would be in that room—with other women present. There would be no after-dinner separation of the sexes.

  Women did not have to behave as men to succeed, she said; men were their companions “in the same hard business of being human.” She spent her life trying to prove that assumption, even though in an unpublished book called “The Education of a Woman,” she wrote that “commonly women are judged to be less generous than men, but they have reason to be: they are liable to so many more kinds of failure.” Women frequently had to prove themselves in ways men did not. “It’s not easy,” she concluded, “not as the writing wife of a well-known writing husband.” She always felt she deserved to be more front-and-center.

  She worked every single day, writing even harder after she became a mother at the age of forty-three. She was what could be called the first “family feminist,” pursuing her ambitions but at the same time putting her child and husband on equal footing with her career, one that positioned the couple as leading members of the so-called Family of New York Intellectuals. Yet she would tell an interviewer, in a never-before-cited tape recording, that although she considered hers “a great marriage, it was not one of the great love affairs.” She and Lionel “were a neurotic pair,” she confessed, a couple “that in later decades got known in the world as the most beautifully self-contained, calm and harmonious figures.”

  Diana Trilling’s life—one full of secrets, contradictions, and betrayals—chronicles social, political, sexual, and literary changes over the decades of the twentieth century, enormous changes she lived through and was in almost constant conflict over. Despite going through her “own private hell,” she found a path into many rooms that once excluded her by using words that seem to shimmer with candor and wisdom. Her work could be breathtaking and innovative in a way that only a person with her sensibility could create.

  She wrote a memoir called The Beginning of the Journey, and her husband wrote a novel called The Middle of the Journey. This book tells The Untold Journey.

  Note: All quotations by Diana Trilling using “Diana said” or “Diana noted,” etc. without further explanation are from previously unpublished tapes she made in the 1980s with Christopher Zinn. These tapes, which I regard as “oral history,” contribute to my belief that a biography should be part oral history, part interpretation, and part storytelling. The transcribed tapes are all housed in the Diana Trilling Papers at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University.

  All other Diana Trilling quotations are from documents identified directly in the text or further clarified in the source notes. DT also made a series of tapes in the 1970s for a book of interviews she never published; these tapes, once housed in the Oral History Research Office at Columbia, are now transcribed and located in her archives.

  1

  ESCAPE INTO FICTION

  Pop. Pop. Crrrack. The handsome briarwood Dunhill pipe, flung from the fifth-floor window of a two-room apartment at Number 1 Bank Street in Greenwich Village, New York, landed smack on the sidewalk, its once tapered form in pieces that scattered into the gutter. It had been the man’s favorite pipe, so later he “puddled around” the street, as
his wife described it, looking for the parts in the hope of fitting them together again, which never happened. It was too far gone. A lost cause. As was, evidently, a comic mystery play the man’s wife had cowritten that had caused the man to call it “vulgar babble” after reading it aloud in the presence of one of his college friends, and further caused the man—Lionel Mordecai Trilling—in a fury—to hurl his pipe out the window in front of his bride of one year, Diana Rubin Trilling. She had cried and cried. “I didn’t think you would cry,” her husband’s best friend, Henry Rosenthal, a rabbi, in fact the rabbi who had officiated at the wedding of “Di” and “Li,” had sheepishly told her before leaving the apartment.

  “They thought the air was polluted by the play,” Diana Trilling later noted. “It was a terrible fight, which left me seriously discouraged. It had a bad effect on me, and it was one of the least worthy things I’ve ever known Lionel to do.”

  The play was about a Jewish clothing manufacturer with a passion for suspense stories who solves a murder in his apartment building on West End Avenue, and Diana and her Radcliffe pal Bettina Mikol Sinclair had written it mostly for their own amusement. Neither had considered writing as a career, and both knew their play wasn’t very good, even though through connections (Bettina was married to Upton Sinclair’s son, David) they discovered a well-known theater agent, Leah Salisbury, who liked it enough to forward to a London producer, who in the end turned it down because “the type of artist[s] necessary for the principal characters are not to be found in this country at ordinary salaries.” In other words, Jewish actors cost more money. Two years later, Salisbury sent the play to a story editor at the Jewish-owned Paramount Pictures who thought it clever but ultimately pronounced it “too light.” And that was that for the twenty-character Snitkin, whose last line of dialogue, spoken by Mrs. Snitkin, read: “I’m asking you, what does a woman know what a man has to suffer in this world!” Both inexperienced playwrights were pondering such questions. Radcliffe had offered them some small practical answers but not the big, philosophical ones they longed for.